The Poetry of Sport / The Sport of Poetry

The Poetry of Sport / The Sport of Poetry

 

     IRELAND’S ‘PROPER’ POETRY is not much concerned with sporting matters. Yeats here and there demonstrates a passing knowledge of angling, hooking berries to threads and so forth in the perhaps slightly unconvincing trout-fishing episode of his ‘Song of Wandering Aengus’, for example, but WB apart, nothing much else springs immediately to mind.

 

     As I glance through the contents pages of Ireland’s ‘Other’ Poetry, however, I notice that (without particularly planning to do so) we have included a good deal of sport. There’s animal racing of all sorts, including greyhounds (‘A Ballad of Master McGrath’), donkeys (‘Delaney’s Donkey’ by William Hargreaves), and horses (‘Bellewstown Hill’ by John Costello, Anthony Cronin’s ‘”Fairway’s” Faraway’ and the anonymous ‘Galway Races’). There’s show jumping (Ned Buckley’s ‘Our Army Jumping Team’), cycling (Percy French’s ‘The Cycles of Time’), pleasure boating (‘A Longford Legend’), sea bathing (Ewart Milne’s ‘Cockles and Mussels’), fencing (the decidedly obscene nineteenth-century broadside ballad ‘Targin Tallyo’), and cricket – with what has unverifiably been claimed as Oscar Wilde’s first literary creation, from his schooldays at Portora. This unlikely composition reads in its entirety:

 

‘ON CRICKET’

 

Never more will I play

     With the soaring and gay

But cruel in its fall –

     The mean old cricket ball.

 

     I have a hazy recollection of various off-colour rugby songs from my schooldays – the line ‘putting it in together’ seems to have seared itself on my memory, and over the years I have certainly come across many ballads celebrating the victories of various Gaelic football  and hurling teams. Alas, I now shamefully notice, we have included nothing on either hurling, Gaelic or rugby: the omissions will I hope be remedied in future books.

 

     However, there are in the book two entries to do with soccer: Christy Moore’s famous song, ‘Joxer Goes to Stuttgart’, written after Ireland’s best ever showing in the World Cup, and an extract from a thrilling mock-heroic epic published in  1721, ‘A Match at Football, or The Irish Champions’, by Matthew Concanen. The extract, whch we have entitled ‘A Tackle on Terence’, begins with the words:

 

First Paddy struck the ball, John stopt its course,

And sent it backward with redoubl’d force;

Dick met, and meeting smote the light machine,

Reptile it ran, and skimm’d along the green,

’Till Terence stopp’d – with gentle strokes he trolls

(Th’ obedient ball in short excursions rolls),

Then swiftly runs and drives it o’er the plain;

Follow the rest, and chase the flying swain.

     

     But for now we shall have to imagine the rest of the game: I have gone on quite long enough. In the undying words with which Brendan O’Reilly used to sign off a thousand television broadcasts in the 1960s, ‘Sin a bhfuil ag cúrsaí spóirt anocht’ (That’s all there is of sporting matters tonight). And so indeed it is.

 

The email address for any ideas or verses you may have is: irelandsotherpoetry@hotmail.com. All contributions gratefully received.